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You find your people and you make your tribe and you protect each other from the wolves.
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John David Anderson (Posted)
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Words are ghosts that can haunt us forever.
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John David Anderson (Posted)
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Keep your head up. Keep your eyes forward. And don't let go.
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John David Anderson (Posted)
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Words accumulate. And once they're free there's no taking them back.
You can do an awful lot of damage with a handful of words. Destroy a friendship. End a marriage. Start a war. Some words can break you to pieces.
But that's not all. Words can be beautiful. they can make you feel things you've never felt before. Gather enough of them and they can stick those same pieces back together, provided they're the right words, said at the right time. But that takes more courage than you'd think.
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John David Anderson (Posted)
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And that people who get embarrassed by other people who laugh or sing too loud just don’t have the guts to laugh and sing out loud themselves.
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John David Anderson (Posted)
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If you only listen to what others say, you’ll never hear yourself think,
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John David Anderson (Posted)
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They set their hooks into you and pull. Words accumulate like a cancer, and then they eat away at you until there is nothing left. And once they are let loose there really is no taking them
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John David Anderson (Posted)
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Dungeons & Dragons was like that. Forget that half the kids in school probably went around slaying dragons and stashing loot on their PlayStations or iPads. It's different when you actually have to roll the dice.
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John David Anderson (Posted)
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Words are ghosts that can haunt us forever." from Posted
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John David Anderson
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Half the world is composed of people who have something to say and can’t, and the other half who have nothing to say and keep on saying it. —Robert Frost CONTENTS Dedication
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John David Anderson (Posted)
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You find your people and you make your tribe and you protect each other. From the wolves.
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John David Anderson (Posted)
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I have this theory. I call it the theory of socio-magnetic homogeny. A bunch of big words, but it basically says that people gravitate toward people who share their interests and whatnot.
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John David Anderson (Posted)
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I know what you are going to say: sticks, stones, and broken bones, but words can kick you in the gut. They wriggle underneath your skin and start to itch. They set their hooks into you and pull. Words accumulate like a cancer, and then they eat away at you until there is nothing left. And once they are let loose there really is no taking them back.
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John David Anderson (Posted)
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We all need something that's ours. A thing that we know absolutely about ourselves that others can only guess at.
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John David Anderson
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The road forks sometimes and you have to choose.
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John David Anderson (Posted)
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There’s no Band-Aid for a broken heart.
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John David Anderson (Posted)
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A stranger is just a friend you haven’t met yet
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John David Anderson (Posted)
John David Anderson (Posted)
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All those messages, so important, so pressing, so necessary. Maybe Wolf’s right and they never really disappear. Even after they’re crumpled and thrown away, they linger and become ghosts. Not the kind that hide up in the attic rattling your shutters, but the kind that follow you wherever you go, coming back to you like an echo, like when something leaves a bad taste in your mouth. I don’t know if that’s guilt or regret.
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John David Anderson (Posted)
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It makes you wonder where they all go, all the letters and notes, the thank-you cards and he birthday invitations, the little missives scrawled along the edges of grocery lists, the doodles on the cardboard backs of spiral-bound notebooks. All the messages, so important, so pressing, so necessary.
Maybe Wolf’s right and they never really disappear. Even after they’re crumpled and thrown away, they linger and become ghosts. Not the kind that hide up in the attic rattling your shutters, but the kind that follow you wherever you go, coming back to you like an echo, like when something leaves a bad taste in your mouth. I don’t know if that’s guilt or regret.
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John David Anderson (Posted)
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none of us is alone. We might feel alone sometimes, but more often than not we are just lonely. There’s a difference. We aren’t alone because it’s basic human nature to band together. Herd mentality. We are programmed to find our people.
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John David Anderson (Posted)
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It doesn’t take much. A poem. A catch. A glance. A roll of the dice. And it doesn’t matter what’s true and what isn’t. Doesn’t matter what you think you know about yourself. The things you have the guts to tell people and the things you don’t. You get your label, and then you get ignored, or sometimes you get teased, but mostly you go about your business, thinking things that you would never say out loud, not to someone’s face.
But there are some words you know you can’t say. Not out loud, not without getting into serious trouble. You might whisper them to your friends, but you would never write them down. Instead you find some other way. A secret code. An inside joke… And everyone knows what it means, but nobody says anything.
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John David Anderson (Posted)
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But that’s not all. Words can be beautiful. They can make you feel things you’ve never felt before. Gather enough of them and they can stick those same pieces back together, provided they’re the right words, said at the right time. But that takes more courage than you’d think.
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John David Anderson (Posted)
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The cool thing about Bench was that he didn’t seem to care that he wasn’t very good; he just enjoyed being a part of the team. The other players didn’t mind having him around because he was a nice guy (who also never threatened to replace them), and the coaches liked him because he was an A student and never complained. Bench was BMS’s poster boy for student athletes;
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John David Anderson (Posted)
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That's what a secret is. It's a confession in disguise. Well, sort of. The whole power of a secret is in the keeping - the power of knowing something that nobody else does. But the whole point of confession is letting go. You're supposed to feel better afterward. Like the weight has been lifted and your soul is suddenly free to fly or whatever.
But what if it isn't? What if, after telling someone, you feel just as bad as you did before, except now everybody else knows? And you can see it in their eyes as you walk down the hall? Your secrets staring right back at you? Wasn't it better, sometimes, to not say anything at all?
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John David Anderson
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so close that their chapped cheeks almost touched.
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John David Anderson (Posted)
John David Anderson (Posted)
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Branton, Michigan. Population: Not a Lot and Yet Still Too Many I Don’t Particularly Care For.
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John David Anderson (Posted)
John David Anderson (Posted)
John David Anderson (Posted)
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had initials on it and an arrow shot through the center. Since when did pierced vital organs become a symbol for love?
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John David Anderson (Posted)
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you can’t be friends with everyone, and even the friends you do make won’t always last forever,
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John David Anderson (Posted)
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There’s a famous Alfred Hitchcock movie called The Birds. It sounds like a documentary, but trust me, it’s not. In the movie all the birds in this small California town go all avian apocalypse and start attacking people—plucking out eyes, blowing up gas stations, pecking everyone to death—just about the same time that this one woman shows up. Whether or not she’s the reason the birds attack isn’t entirely clear. It could just be a fluke. Or maybe there is something about this lady that makes the birds batty. I watched the movie with Bench, who conked out about halfway through after muttering for an hour straight that any movie without at least one CGI character was bound to be boring. I watched to the end, though. I wanted to see if the woman was going to make it out of the town alive or if the birds would get her.
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John David Anderson (Posted)
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could tell. The disruption to the natural order of the universe. After another twenty seconds of awkward-as-walking-in-on-your-dad-shaving-naked-in-the-bathroom quiet, Rose set her crackers down, leaned back in her chair, and let out a sigh. “Okay,” she said. “I’m guessing you’re all new to this ‘girl at the table’ thing. How about this: I promise that I won’t bite or give you cooties or whatever else it is that you all are flipping out over. I won’t talk about my hair or blather on and on about celebrity heartthrobs or all the girls I hate, because, frankly, I’ve only been here for three hours, which isn’t quite enough time to hate anybody yet. I won’t discuss brands of moisturizers or lip gloss or use the word ‘crush’ in any kind of nondestructive capacity. And in return, you can stop looking at me like I’m some deranged lunatic. How does that sound?
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John David Anderson (Posted)
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To prove his point, Mr. Sword launched into a lecture on Elizabethan theater, which was actually pretty boring until he described how actors would fill animal bladders with sheep’s blood and keep them beneath their stage clothes so that they would explode in a gruesome display during fight scenes. Sometimes, he said, if you were one of the lucky ones sitting up front you’d get some of the blood on your clothes too. He called it the sixteenth-century splash zone.
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John David Anderson (Posted)
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My dad reached over and scuffed my hair. “It’s not guilt,” he said, “it’s regret. They aren’t quite the same.” He took another sip of wine and went back into the house, leaving me and Robert Frost on the porch. He moved out three months later.
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John David Anderson (Posted)
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He who knows does not speak; he who speaks does not know. Freedom is the right to tell people what they do not want to hear. The early bird gets the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese. The pen is mightier than the sword.
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John David Anderson (Posted)
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Point is, none of us is alone. We might feel alone sometimes, but more often than not we are just lonely. There’s a difference. We aren’t alone because it’s basic human nature to band together. Herd mentality. We are programmed to find our people.
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John David Anderson (Posted)